Elizabeth Zelvin - Bruce Kohler 04 - Death Will Save Your Life (3 page)

“The country!” Jimmy said. “I still don’t get it. If the lake’s no good, I’ll get the car and drive toward town.”

“Poor bunny,” Barbara said. “Okay, we’ll see you later.”

She finished her rabbit food, I dumped the rest of mine, and she marched me off. Uphill. Too bad guests were forbidden to use the electric golf carts in which staff tooled around the grounds.

“Now, don’t panic.” Wind chimes tinkled as Barbara opened the door. “They know what they’re doing. You’ll feel great.”

“Yeah, but will I crumble to dust when I leave?” I sniffed in eucalyptus and patchouli.

“Your Healer is Ayesha,” the receptionist told Barbara. “And your name, darlin’?”

“Bruce,” Barbara answered for me. “It’s his first time.”

“You’re gonna love it, darlin’,” she said. “Here’s Parvati for you.”

“I can’t have, uh, a guy?” I bleated.

“Lorenzo is booked all afternoon. Don’t worry, darlin’. Parvati’s got hands like lug wrenches. And she’s very spiritual.”

Parvati was a freckled redhead in a gold and magenta sari with silver bells in her hair and on her toes. She did that bow with the hands together thing and led me down the hall, past a burly guy who had to be Lorenzo: ferocious eyebrows and enough thick, wavy black hair to weave a muffler.

“Hi, Lorenzo, hope I’m not late.” The skinny little dude scurrying barefoot down the hall behind me glanced at his watch like the White Rabbit.

“Right on time,” Lorenzo boomed.

Parvati put on some New Age music that reduced Lorenzo’s voice to a rumble beyond the thin wall. Soon I was draped in a sheet and starting to enjoy the sensuous slide of her warm, oiled palms over my back and shoulders. She began to work powerful fingers into my knotted muscles. I figured the least I could do was show some interest in her.

“Are you a full-time, uh, massage person?”

“Massage therapist. I also teach some yoga classes, and I do astrological readings. Have you ever had your chart done?”

Woo-woo.

“No,” I said, “never.”

“If you like bodywork,” she said, “Lorenzo next door is a chiropractor. He does therapeutic touch and reflexology as well.”

She was working on my feet now, rolling all those delicate bones around in her powerful hands. Ooohhh, mmm, aaahhh.

“It’s okay not to talk,” she said.

I was almost asleep when the New Age music stopped. I jumped when someone pounded a heavy fist on the door of the adjacent room.

“I’m with a client,” Lorenzo called. “Please come back later.”

The pounding continued.

“Lorenzo, dammit! Lorenzo! We need to talk NOW!”

I heard the door click twice as Lorenzo stepped outside and closed it behind him.

“Please, Mr. Markowitz, keep your voice down. This is a temple of healing.”

“I don’t care if it’s the goddamn end of the rainbow! Your goddamn so-called therapeutic touch screwed up my sciatic nerve. You managed to jinx my medication reactions, too. I might as well pop jellybeans for all the good painkillers are doing since you started waving your hands around.”

“Please, Mr. Markowitz! I’m sorry you’re experiencing discomfort, but as I told you when we began our work together, the chi energies can be unpredictable. We won’t experience the full benefit until we’ve completed your course of treatment.”

“
We
won’t experience anything, and my course of treatment is over! When my lawyer is through with you, you’ll never crack a neck in this town again!”

“It’s not my fault,” Jimmy said, heaving himself upward.

“I know, bro.” I swatted a branch away from my face. “The desire to get up at the crack of dawn is not on the Y chromosome.”

“You were awake!” Barbara said.

“Maybe Jimmy was,” I said, “but how do you know I wasn’t fast asleep?”

“Elementary,” Barbara said. “You complained about your roommate snoring the moment we saw you.”

“Snoring and sneezing,” I said. “Maybe a hibernating bear could have slept through it.”

We were headed toward a bald patch known as the Outlook, from which the view at sunrise was said to be spectacular.

“This place is one big hill,” Jimmy complained, grumpy as a rudely awakened bear himself.

“A big hill is called a mountain,” I said.

“Nonsense,” Barbara said.

“Are we there yet? My lungs are bursting.”

“Listen! Can you hear the Carolina wren? It says ‘teakettle, teakettle.’”

“I don’t care,” I said, “unless it says says ‘coffeepot, coffeepot.’”

“Come on, guys. We don’t want to miss the sunrise.”

I said, “There’ll be another one tomorrow, dammit.

“Today is all we have.” She grinned at us over her shoulder.

“
Damn
, I could use a cigarette. I left them in the room.”

“Shut up and climb, Bruce,” Jimmy advised.

“Breathe in the fresh air,” Barbara said. “Enjoy the great outdoors.”

We climbed in silence for a while.

The sun was beginning to rise as we came out into a clearing. The air had a golden pink cast to it. A faint susurration overhead hinted at the gentlest breeze shifting the leaves. Not even a bird call broke the peace. Shafts of light like a bundle of luminous arrows pierced the gloom.

“Come on,” Barbara whispered.

“Why are we whispering?” I whispered.

“Shh, someone’s meditating.”

Barbara tiptoed forward toward where the rock dropped off. A man sat close to the edge, contemplating the glorious eastern sky.

Jimmy murmured in my ear, “It’s Markowitz.”

The hike seemed to be over. Good, that meant I could sit down.

“Bruce!” Jimmy snapped.

“Hush, Jimmy!” Barbara protested. “What?”

“Come and look.”

“Is he sick? Bruce, be careful, he’s awfully close to the edge. Jimmy, step back. What is it?”

Jimmy dropped to his knees next to Melvin. I knelt beside him.

“Something’s wrong with his head,” I said.

“Watch out,” Jimmy said. “It’s a long way down.”

It was hard to get a full frontal look at Melvin because he was so close to the drop-off. His legs were crossed, not quite in lotus position, bony knees sticking up out of the natural-fabric shorts. He was wearing an Aquarius T-shirt.

“What’s that around his neck?” Barbara fluttered around behind us like a hummingbird going at a hollyhock.

“A luggage strap,” Jimmy said. “They sell them in the gift shop.”

I thought about whether or not to make a crack about a rainbow-colored garrote—only at Woo-Woo Farm. My inner smartass comes out when I’m rattled. I settled for, “People had them on the train. It could be anyone’s.”

The brightly striped webbing had been wrapped tightly around Melvin’s neck. His face was purple; his eyes bugged out; his tongue lolled.

Jimmy and I exchanged a look and reached out simultaneously. I laid two fingers on the neck where it bulged above the tightened strap. He touched the livid knee with its tufts of red-gray hair.

“Cold.” We spoke simultaneously.

“We should do something,” Barbara said. “Lay him down. CPR. Something.”

“It’s too late, petunia,” Jimmy said. “We shouldn’t touch him again. He’s dead.”

Melvin Markowitz had said his last nasty word.

Jimmy and Barbara stayed with the body while I climbed back down the mountain to find someone to tell. I scrambled down the trail a lot faster than we had come up it.

It was still very early. The administrative office was deserted. At the dining hall, I found Madhouse, Feather, and the kitchen crew shoveling in granola and organic peanut butter. I buttonholed a guy who said he was an assistant director and told him what had happened.

The administrator called the police and sent a couple of kids from the elf patrol to stand out on the road and direct them when they arrived. Then he led me around the back of the admin building to the small graveled lot where they kept the electric carts.

“Climb in,” he said.

“There’s a road up to the Outlook?” Now he tells me.

“It’s just a service road. We don’t like the guests to use it. God, this is awful. Someone will have to break the news to his wife.”

Honey! Honey was a widow now. Poor kid.

The cart crunched over the gravel and nosed through a gap in the trees to a hidden road, unpaved but wider and considerably less steep than the trail. And here came the cops. We could hear the wail of sirens as we reached the Outlook. Cop cars with flashing lights and an ambulance all used the service road.

The police sealed the clearing off with yellow tape. They shooed Jimmy and Barbara and me off to wait on the rocks until they had time to talk to us. Guys in plaid shirts and jeans moved around, examining the body, taking pictures, and snuffling along the ground like bloodhounds. The sweat I’d worked up dashing up and down the mountain turned chill on my skin. Barbara looked miserable and spacey.

“I think I’m in shock,” she said. “Listen.” We listened to her teeth give a little castenet recital. “How are you guys doing?”

“Just fine and wonderful,” I said.

“A quiet weekend in the country, huh?” Jimmy said.

One of the plaid-shirted men beckoned us to come forward. As we approached, he muttered, not quite under his breath, “Merry Christmas. Here come the fruitcakes.”

“I’m Detective Callaghan. Which of you folks found the body?”

“We all found him,” Jimmy said. “Together.”

“All of you, huh.” He took out a fat, battered black notebook and started scribbling notes. He posed his questions as if he resented having to ask them and repeated our answers as if he didn’t believe them.

We explained who we were as best we could. Why we were at Aquarius Institute. How we knew the deceased. What the hell we were doing up a mountain at six in the morning.

“You didn’t try to move him? Not to see if you could help him?”

“We knew he was dead,” Barbara said. “His face was purple.”

“I touched his knee,” Jimmy said. “He was cold.”

“I felt for a pulse in his neck,” I said. “His skin was like ice. Someone mentioned CPR. But it was obvious to all of us that there was nothing we could do.”

“You say none of you had ever met this Markowitz before coming up here on Friday?”

“Never,” Jimmy said.

“I wasn’t even in his workshop,” I pointed out. “I never met him at all.”

“Except on the train,” Barbara blurted.

“On the train coming up from the city,” I explained. “I didn’t know it was them.”

“Them?” Callaghan pounced on the plural like a ferret down a rabbit hole.

“His wife,” Barbara said before I could stop her. “Bruce overheard Melvin bullying his wife.” She was just trying to get the attention off us. I wished she hadn’t pointed the cop at Honey.

“A lot of people didn’t get along with him,” I protested. “His ex, his first wife, is up here too. Her name is Annabel Clay. His sister and brother-in-law, too. They work at Aquarius and they live here. No love lost there.”

“Nobody in the group liked him much,” Barbara babbled. “And Bruce and I both heard him having an altercation with one of the staff at Shangri-La. That’s the wellness center. So did our bodyworkers; you can ask them.”

“Woo woo,” Callaghan said under his breath.

Good luck trying to convince him we were having separate massages in private rooms and not an orgy.

“My roommate here is his literary agent,” I said. “I’d never met him, either. We were assigned to the room as singles. His name’s Custer. He can probably tell you all about Markowitz.”

“Are we through here, Detective?” Jimmy said. “We’ve been up since before dawn, we’ve had a shock, and we hardly knew the man. This has nothing to do with us.”

“Yeah. Well.” Callaghan’s lips tightened. “You stick around. Be prepared to make yourselves available if we need you.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, before Barbara could start arguing.

“Thank you, Detective,” Jimmy called over his shoulder as we got the hell out of there.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Jimmy moaned. “Did you hear that, man? Stick around, he says.”

Barbara and I started to laugh at the same time. A little shaky and hysterical, maybe, but I was glad we could find anything funny right now.

“Oh, Jimmy, how wonderful,” Barbara caroled. “We get to spend another few days in the country!”